England

The Kingdom of England (927-1707) was an absolute monarchy located in southern Britannia. With its capital at London, England grew to encompass not only present-day England, but also Wales, Scotland, Ireland, Northern Ireland, the Channel Islands, large chunks of France, all of Canada, the east coast of the United States, and British Honduras.

History
First united by Athelstan in 927, the Anglo-Saxons founded the Kingdom of Angle-Terre. Of course, such a great kingdom was forged in bloodshed; they had to fight for their independence against Denmark and their domains in England, as well as the Pictish tribes of Scotland to the north and France to the south. In 1066, modern England was founded when William the Conqueror, the Duke of Normandy, landed in England to seize it from King Harold II, who had taken the throne despite a promise by his successor that William would become king. At the Battle of Stamford Bridge, Harold II defeated the Norwegian king Harald Hardrada and killed him, ending the last Viking invasion of England, but he was defeated in turn at the Battle of Hastings by William, who became the new king. After Hastings, William captured London and York from the Anglo-Saxons and crushed a rebellion in Normandy.

England under Norman rule led to the conversion of the people to Christianity rather than paganism, and much of the architecture was based on Norman designs. William II of England, the new king of England after the death of William the Conqueror in 1087, led England into the First Crusade in 1096, expanding English influence. But this had not been the first time that England expanded its lands; William the Conqueror, as Duke of Normandy, had also incorporated Normandy into England's lands. He was allies and enemies with France at times, dying during the siege of a French castle.

King William II fought many wars to expand England's domains in France, and England became a part of the "Angevin Empire", encompassing their (the House of Plantagenet, the ruling family) lands in England, Central and Northern France, and Ireland. They fought with the Aragonese Empire over control of Italy in the 1200s, as England fought France and the Muslims in the 1100s. One of their greatest kings, Richard I of England, launched the Third Crusade in 1190 and defeated the Muslims many times, and died in the siege of Chalus in France in 1199. England's power gradually increased, and had yet to be broken.

The might of England ended in 1214 with the Battle of Bouvines, where the French king Philip II defeated the army of Otto IV of Germany, consisting of Imperial, Flemish, English, and Boulognese troops. King John I of England was also faced with rebellion at home, in the First Baron's Revolt, and he was forced to sign the Magna Carta, limiting his powers. England lost most of their lands in France to the French king in the aftermath of the war, and it left them hampered both internally and externally.

King John's rule was mirrored by that of King Henry III of England later in the 13th century, during which King Henry over-exercised his powers as monarch. In 1258 this resulted in the rebellions of Llewelyn ap Gruffyd in Wales and Brian O'Neil in Ireland, and both countries conquered much of England's lands. While King Edward I of England crushed the Welsh in 1286, Ireland remained independent, albeit an ally of England from which England could draw conscripts. The loss of Ireland was made up for with the conquest of Scotland; King Edward took advantage of a succession crisis after the death of King Alexander III of Scotland to invade the country and proclaim himself King. He carried off the Stone of Scone, on which Scottish kings were coronated, to London, and he was made King of Scotland in 1296 after victory in the Battle of Dunbar.

Scotland did not sit still under English rule, with William Wallace leading an independence struggle from 1297 to 1305, reaching the gates of London but stopping due to the pleas of the Mayor's wife. Scotland held onto its independence even after Wallace was captured and executed, as Robert the Bruce continued the war with England from 1305 onwards. England and Scotland were at war well into the 1500s.

After King Edward's death, King Edward II messed with England's diplomacy; he lost the War of Saint-Sardos with France in 1326, lost the Battle of Bannockburn and thus lost Scotland as a province, and was eventually overthrown by Queen Isabella of France in 1327. Their son Edward III of England was crowned on 1 February as a young man, and rose to become a military genius; he reclaimed Scotland with the Battle of Halidon Hill in 1333, and proceeded to wage war against France in the Hundred Years War, claiming the throne of France by right of his mother.

England was preoccupied with warring against France from 1337 to 1453, spending all of their men and resources in combat for control of France. They won most of the battles by use of the longbow against French knights, but in 1429, French woman Joan of Arc led a determined resistance struggle that drove the English from Orleans. Although she was burnt at the stake in 1433 by the Burgundians and English, she inspired the struggle that saw the English evicted from France (Calais apart) in 1457.

The loss of France was a blow to England, who went through religious issues in the early 1500s as they introduced Protestantism to their country through the Church of England. Henry VIII of England fought France in the Italian Wars, aiding the Papal States, but in 1557 his successor Mary I of England lost Calais to the French, ending their lands in France and their hopes of having a mainland base. The result of the Italian Wars was to prove France's might, but although England lost, they were able to use the Royal Navy for the first time. Founded in the late 15th century, the Royal Navy quickly rose as one of the world's best navies, and later achieved that title in 1587 after defeating a Spanish invasion.

England became a colonial power in the 1580s after setting up a colony at Roanoke in the present-day United States state of North Carolina, establishing it to rival Spanish control of the New World. The Anglo-Spanish War of the 1580s-1600s raged violently, as English privateers such as Francis Drake, John Hawkins, and Martin Frobisher raided Spanish shipping. Although the Roanoke colony failed, in 1607 the English set up the Jamestown colony in Virginia, and the Plymouth colony in Massachusetts in 1622. English expansion in the New World gave them most of the east coast of the USA.

At the same time, the Thirty Years War raged, and England's king Charles I of England failed in his attempts to intervene. By 1640, England left the war, as the Scottish Presbyterians rose up against his forced conversion of Scotland to Episcopalianism. King Charles initially won against the Scots, but his power was contested by Parliament during the English Civil Wars. In 1649, after years of bloody warfare, he was executed and the English Commonwealth, led by Oliver Cromwell, took power. Cromwell invaded Scotland and Ireland to root out Royalist supporters of the exiled King Charles II of England, and by 1652 the revolt had been quelled. England remained a Parliamentarian-ruled country until Cromwell's death in 1658, after which his son Richard Cromwell was overthrown by a New Model Army revolt that let Charles II become king.

In the aftermath of the English Civil Wars (1642-1653), England was once more ruled by the Catholic House of Stuart of Charles II, and it allied with France against the United Provinces in the Anglo-Dutch Wars. In 1667, England took over New Amsterdam in the Americas from the Dutch, renaming it New York and New Jersey. They were able to have a great profit from the trans-Atlantic trade; they also took over the island of Jamaica in 1657 in a war with Spain, and had also set up colonies in the Bahamas and British Honduras (Belize).

England's Stuart Catholic government was taken over by United Provinces Stadtholder Willem, who became the King of England in 1688 after ousting James II of England in the Glorious Revolution. England became a Protestant country once more, and became a constitituional monarchy with a more democratic government. England and the Dutch allied against France in the War of the Grand Alliance of 1688-1697, and in the War of the Spanish Succession (1701-1714). King William not only achieved great military victories, but also united; in 1707, England, Scotland, Ireland, and Wales united to form Great Britain.